HP-UX Workload Manager User's Guide

Introduction
WLM and partitions
Chapter 150
WLM and partitions
The HP Partitioning Continuum offers several forms of partitioning:
• Hard partitions
These partitions are electronically isolated through hardware
separation. One such partition is a complete server, which can be
clustered in an HP Serviceguard high availability cluster. The other
type of hard partition, called nPartition, is a portion of a single
server. For example, nPartitions are available on Superdome and
Keystone servers, which can support up to 16 nPartitions on one
server node with cell-based hardware isolation and complete
software isolation (each nPartition runs its own copy of HP-UX). The
isolation guarantees that an application running in one nPartition is
not affected by an application or hardware failure in another
nPartition.
• Virtual partitions
HP virtual partitions, which are implemented in software, offer a
unique granularity of partitioning for servers. You can create virtual
partitions consisting of one or more cores. Each virtual partition runs
its own instance of the HP-UX operating system. Complete software
isolation is provided between virtual partitions. Virtual partitions
can be used within hard partitions.
•Virtual machines
These partitions, much like virtual partitions, are created with
software. However, they emulate generic servers, and therefore can
offer sub-core and shared I/O capabilities. Each virtual machine runs
its own operating system. HP Integriy Virtual Machines can be used
within hard partitions.
• Resource partitions
These partitions are provided by the HP Process Resource Manager
(PRM) for managing PSETs or FSS groups. Granularity is defined
either by whole cores (by PSETs) or a percentage of a number of cores
(by FSS groups). Resource partitions enable you to partition system
resources (including memory and disk bandwidth) within a single